Today’s Private Practice Podcast Sponsor:

Practice Nation, Meet the Perry Rosenbloom from Brighter Vision

He started Brighter Vision. Brighter Vision is the complete web solution for therapists. (Full disclosure, Brighter Vision is a sponsor of The Most Awesome Conference, as part of the sponsorship, he got to be interviewed by me. However, I really believe in what he’s doing and wouldn’t interview him if I didn’t think he’d add value for you!)

They’ve incorporated the best features from leading providers, created them where they didn’t exist, and packaged them into a fully customized, mobile responsive website designed to market you and your practice.

Here’s how they describe their process:

“Our process is as straight forward as it comes:

Sign up

Choose from one of our beautiful frameworks built specifically for health professionals

And the entire process typically requires about 60-90 minutes of your time!

What about support? All included, no extra fee!

What about SEO? An annual audit is included at no extra cost to you.

With Brighter Vision, you get the entire package so you can rest assured you’re receiving a professional website, that’s well-managed and well-optimized, so you can put your efforts into seeing patients and growing your practice.”

Music from the Podcast

Silence is Sexy

Builders

Joseph R. Sanok, MA, LLP, LPC, NCC

Joe Sanok is an ambitious results expert. He is a private practice business consultant and counselor that helps small businesses and counselors in private practice to increase revenue and have more fun! He helps owners with website design, vision, growth, and using their time to create income through being a private practice consultant.

Joe was frustrated with his lack of business and marketing skills when he left graduate school. He loved helping people through counseling, but felt that often people couldn’t find him. Over the past few years he has grown his skills, income, and ability to lead others, while still maintaining an active private practice in Traverse City, MI.

Here is the Transcription of This Podcast

This is Practice of the Practice Podcast with Joe Sanok, Session 70. Welcome to the Practice of the Practice with Joe Sanok. I am Joe Sanok, your host. I am so glad that you are spending some time with me today.

Today’s episode is being brought to you by Simple Practice. Simple Practice is just this super amazing just practice management software. I’ve been just kind of connecting with them for probably six months or let’s see. I first connected with them, a whole summer time, because I remember I was driving when we were talking on the phone with Howard.

It’s really cool what they’ve developed. A lot of practice management software is just really clunky and complex and I feel like Simple Practice is really like kind of the MacIntosh of just like practice management. It’s just super intuitive, super clean. They’re constantly developing things for their audience and just adding value even beyond just what Simple Practice offers. They’re always doing this webinars and bringing in just good people.

They’re also a sponsor of The Most Awesome Conference and just wanted to give them a shoutout and thank them for being a sponsor with that and a sponsor here in the show. They’re just super awesome. So, check them out and that’s just simplepractice.com. They will hook you up.

Let’s move on to who we’re talking to today. Today I’m going to be talking with Perry Rosenbloom from Brighter Visions. Brighter Visions is just doing some cool stuff, and he’s going to tell you the story.

Sometimes, it’s good to step back and talk about our websites in particular. I was just on a Q & A call on Tuesday and we did this with all the participants that are going to come to The Most Awesome Conference and each of us consultants is doing a Q & A call where they can just ask anything.

We started talking about how I tried out for Oliver Twist when I was a young lad and we also talked about SEO and ranking higher and having pretty websites and all sorts of things. Brighter Vision is just doing some cool stuff. There’s kind of like, the way I frame it is if you want to do it yourself, you absolutely can. I have some walk-throughs on practiceofthepractice.com/website101.

That has some links around hosting, around kind of how to build a website. I actually want to eventually do kind of some screenshots, like a whole video on that for you, and just to walk you through how to set up in WordPress, a website. And then that’s kind of like the most sweat equity. If you are at the point where you just got to boot strap it and hassle like, by all means do that.

The next level up is going to be working with Brighter Vision where they have this monthly fee. They help build your website, they do all your SEO, really they compete, and they’ll talk a little bit pretty heavily against therapy sites and so just make beautiful websites.

On the show in the past, you’ve heard me talk about my friend, Aaron from Legendary Lion, who’s also been a sponsor. He builds it, but that kind of ongoing SEO side of it, he doesn’t necessarily do that, as part of that initial package. Just to have those options, and be able to hash through what’s best for you. What’s great about this conference is, I hadn’t heard about Brighter Visions before this conference and they became sponsors and I’m looking at it and it just fits so well with what kind of the Practice of the Practice audience wants.

I just want you to know that when I take on sponsors, when I interview people, I want it to reflect myself and reflect kind of you as a community. Let me know what you think of these things. It’d be great to just hear your thoughts. So without any further ado, I give you Perry, from Brighter Visions.

Joe Sanok: Perry Rosenbloom, founder of Brighter Vision, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.

PR: Thanks, Joe. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Joe Sanok: It’s super awesome. There’s just so many areas I want to jump into and talk with you about. Why don’t we just start with, like what is Brighter Vision? Tell us a little bit about your story. I know that you’re a younger company, and you know, just like Practice of the Practice we’re a younger company and you’ve done some really remarkable things in a short period of time.

Maybe just tell us a little bit about why you started it and maybe a little bit about your growth areas.

PR: Sure. Well, Brighter Vision is an all-in-one web solution for therapists. We build beautiful, mobile, responsive websites for therapists, provide search engine optimization, and unlimited support just in one low monthly fee.

We started off about three years ago. I was working as a director of SEO for a local Boulder Company, building up my own websites on the side, teaching myself search engine optimization and web design. Eventually, my websites started performing really well. I quit my full time job and opened an SEO business and we were called SEOSherpas. That went really well for a while, but we found out that we were pigeon-holed with our name of that SEOSherpas, and in January of 2014, we rebranded as Brighter Vision and really focused on productizing a lot of our services.

One of them was sort of this all-in-one web solution model. We’re basically doing websites for anyone at that time. We built websites for restaurants, we built websites for B2B companies, all sort of loan companies, mortgage origination companies, all sorts of industries and also therapists. Eventually, that started just taking off with mental health professionals and help professionals in general.

We started marketing our services to them a little more, and all of a sudden it just started exploding. We read the writing on the wall, closed down every other element of our business and really focused on making ourselves the best in the industry for therapist web design and support.

How to say “no” when money is coming in, when you’re in a niche

Joe Sanok: Now, when you say closed down, I mean, that’s going to be a hard decision to say like, “We’re going to do this single niche.” Over and over, when I interview people whether it’s about their private practice or consulting, like that’s the best piece of advice they keep getting from people, but emotionally there’s got to be part of you that was like, “Oh man! I’m going to say ‘no’ to people that want to give me money.”

PR: It was really tough. Within a month of closing down the SEO part, we’re still getting a bunch of leads from it and still are just from word of mouth referrals and everything. We used to charge for $5,000 to $6,000 for a 6-month campaign. It was a very challenging thing to say “Sorry, you know, we’re not the right fit for this. We’re not doing this anymore. Here are a few other companies that can help you.”

Frankly, it’s even hard to find companies in that price range that will provide a return on investment for people. It was really challenging, but we transitioned you know, our — Caitlin Sachs, who is now our director of Customer Happiness. She was handling all of our SEO campaigns. We retrained her to really understand this portion of our product and just completely pivoted our company and shut down everything else and have exploded since. So niching down was definitely a beneficial thing for us here, as it is with every business it seems.

Joe Sanok: Well, and we were talking a minute ago, before we started recording, about just providing content for the audience. So, the purpose here today, is not to just get a bunch of people that are going to sign up for Brighter Vision. Of course, if you feel like you’re a good fit for Brighter Vision, then you know, definitely check them out and Perry’s got some really cool offers at the end that are — you know, some of them are totally free that are going to help you grow your website and grow your referrals. What are a couple of things just that any website should have, any therapist website should have?

PR: Sure. We reviewed a lot of therapists’ websites. We’ve built a lot of therapists’ websites and something that we noticed very often, first off, responsive design. How does the website format on devices? Does it look the same on a computer as it does on a tablet and a phone? Or does the website reformat itself onto a phone?

So that it puts your phone number front and center, your email front and center and all your perspective clients need to do is click to call you. That’s the number one most important thing that we need to see in websites all across the board.

Joe Sanok: Now, is there a quick way to figure out if your website is responsive?

PR: Yes. What you can do is you can go to studiopress.com/responsive, put your domain name, your website into the bar and just click enter and you’ll see. Right away, you’ll see okay, does it reformat properly or do I see like, I have to pinch and scroll and zoom? Or if you’re on your phone, go to your website and do you have to pinch and zoom and scroll around to try and read all the information, or does your menu bar shrink up, is it formatted into one easily readable column, things like that. That’s the best way to tell if your website is responsive.

Joe Sanok: Okay, sweet. If you’re out running or mowing the lawn or blowing snow, that’ll be in the show notes. So, make sure your website’s responsive. What else should every website have?

PR: So something else that’s really important, our actual call to actions. So often we see websites where the home page has so much information that it’s really difficult to digest it all. You want your home page to have some information, but then provide call to actions for your visitors. What do you want them to do? Do you want them to learn more about you? Direct them to an About Me page. Do you want them to request an appointment? Have a Request Appointment button — things of that nature to really drive your visitors to certain areas of your website that are really important. In general, Request an Appointment or Contact Us — very important, About Me or About Our Practice — very important. Services page — very important. Things of that nature just to drive people and help them sort of navigate your site and understand where they need to go.

Joe Sanok: I know. For me, it’s so frustrating when I’m doing consulting with some people and you go to their website and they have the pop-up that says “Join my email list”, and I’m like, “People are not on your counselling website to join your email list.” If you’re going to have a pop-up it should say “Call me for an appointment”, not join my email list.

PR: Exactly, and there’s a lot of great third party tools that you can integrate onto a WordPress site that will give you that pop-up. One that’s really popular amongst our clients is vcita.com. That’s V as in Victor, C-I-T-A.com, and it will pop-up, it will give you your biophoto, and it’s just in the bottom right-hand corner. So it’s not intrusive at all, but it’s just another call to action on your site. It gives them an idea of what to do, and it gives them an easy access point to actually contact you.

Joe Sanok: Is there a cost for that or that is a free one?

PR: VCita, there is a cost. What is it? They have a few different plans. They have a free plan, and then there is a paid plan, as well, and I don’t know the pricing off the top of my head, unfortunately.

Joe Sanok: That’s fine. You know, the way I think about it though, it’s like so say it, costs more than someone expects. It’s like if you get one client a year because of that, then it’s paid for itself.

PR: Exactly, and you know on our site we have a chat feature to sort of utilize the same thing, and that costs us about 15 dollars a month, but we get so many inquiries through it because all of a sudden there’s a real person talking to someone, and I’m actually the one operating that. And so often it says “Hey! I’m Perry. Let me know if I can help you at all” and people are like, “Is this really Perry or is this a robot?”, and I say “No, no. This is really Perry, I’m right here. You know, I’d be happy to call you right now.”

Joe Sanok: Colorado is beautiful right now.

PR: Yeah it is. It’s almost always beautiful out here in Colorado.

Joe Sanok: Oh yeah! Yeah! I love Colorado. I just — we live by the water and having the lack of lakes, I mean, not as many lakes. I love visiting, but I can’t be away from the water. I’m a water guy.

PR: Yeah, in Colorado you got to get up into the mountains to get the water, and even then it’s Alpine Lake, so it’s really different.

PR: All right. Every therapists’ website, another thing is, you want to position yourself as a resource, so that your clients are coming to your site to learn more, and there’s a lot of great ways that you can do that.

One of the most popular, obviously you can blog, but blogging is very time intensive. It’s effective, but it’s time intensive and if you don’t necessarily have the time to dedicate to a blog, what you can do is sort of syndicate content onto your website from PsychCentral or Psychology Today and this is something that we do for our clients, too.

You can take what’s called their RSS feeds. It will take whatever — you can take a subject such as anxiety, and take an RSS feed which will take all the anxiety- related articles and put them into service syndication technical mumbo jumbo thing. You can take that and utilizing a plug-in with WordPress, take it, put it on your blog and have it pull in the most recent — five most recent articles on that topic from PsychCentral, for example.

That’s a really great way to differentiate yourself, to make yourself a resource so that clients are coming back to your website and engaging with it, and really just positioning yourself as an expert in your field, which is what you have to do with the website these days is really differentiate and be the expert in your market.

Joe Sanok: Now, how does that affect SEO when you write a blog versus if you were to syndicate through an RSS feed?

PR: Great question. So, if you write a blog post yourself, that’s going to be unique content. It’s going to be unique to your website. That will enable you to rank for relevant search queries for that blog post. For example, if you’re a marriage and family counsellor and you can write an article on you know, The Top 5 Warning Signs in Marriages that you need — Top 5 Warning Signs to See a Therapist about in your marriage, and so that will be unique to your website and Google will rank it appropriately so long as it’s providing value to an audience and something like that would.

On the other hand, if you’re going ahead and syndicating content, you’re not going to have a positive SEO impact on your website because it’s going to be attributed to the source that you’re syndicating it from. It’s not necessarily going to have a negative impact, either. It depends how it’s implemented. What we recommend doing is just having a sentence or two about — from the article and then a link to the full length article. That way you’re not having a lot of duplicate content on your website which could be problematic.

What blogs do to help SEO

But if you just you know, basically, if you want to blog and write your own content, it’s going to help you with SEO. If you want to syndicate from 3rd party sources, it won’t hurt your SEO, but it won’t help you either, but it will make you a resource.

Joe Sanok: Sure, sure. So it’s a good way if you’re maybe first starting out or get you’re spending your time somewhere else or something like that.

PR: Exactly.

Joe Sanok: One thing I’ve noticed with counseling websites is it seems like you could take the name of the counseling practice. Say, we’ll call it, Traverse City Hills Counseling, which I live in Traverse City so that’s why I picked Traverse City and that’s not an actual counseling practice. So, Traverse City Hills Counseling and they’ll have pictures of hills and flowing rivers and lakes and it feels like if you took Traverse City Hills Counseling out and put a funeral name in, that it would be like the same.

It would be just as good as a funeral home as it would be for a counseling site, and it seems like the practices that are growing and getting better are the ones that are looking different than maybe the websites of 10 years ago. Could you maybe speak to some more design elements that you’ve noticed in regards to private practice websites?

PR: Sure, that’s a really great question. So, one thing that is really crucial is you know, putting yourself front and center, especially if you’re a solo practitioner. What we always encourage our clients to do, if they have just a solo practice is to put their biophoto somewhere on their site. Either site wide in the side bar with a little bio about you or on your home page, if there’s no side bar on your home page, and just write a little more about you. That way it personalizes your website a lot. It makes it unique, and it makes it feel like you’re speaking directly to your visitor.

That really goes a long way in just a small added touch that’s beneficial. Another thing that we’ve noticed and that we always encourage with our client sites, are quotes that speak to you and speak to your practice. Something that can be really effective is telling a story on your website. For example, one of our themes is called story book and it’s designed specifically for this. You’ll probably see, you know, if someone has a website, and there’s an image slider of mountains and then it goes to a stream and then it goes to a lake.

That’s pretty, but what’s it about you? Take your specialty. Let’s say, you specialize in children and adolescents. What you could do is have a slider on your website that really just sort of tells a story and the text that comes up over the images will redirect people. For example, you could a photo of a child with a mother blurred out in the background, and you can have it say something like “Are you having trouble communicating with your child?” and then the next image scrolls in and it could be someone struggling in school and “Are his or her grades dropping?”

That way, it sort of keeps them engaged on your homepage and it keeps them engaged with your website, and then at the end something we like to do is say something “Does this sound familiar? If so, then I would like to help.” Put your biophoto, put your contact information and that way, all of a sudden people are drawn to your website. They’re engaging with it. It speaks to them.

You want to figure out a way to make your website speak to your audience, so that they don’t just say “Okay, this website looks like the other five I’ve already looked at.” You want it to automatically pop out at them and speak to them and connect with them emotionally. That’s a really, really big factor that we’ve focused on here for our clients.

Joe Sanok: I know. For our Mental Wellness Counseling website, we focused on picking pictures that aren’t necessarily like the depressed person in the corner, but like what’s the result of counseling. You see a daughter on the shoulders of the dad by the beach, you see someone that’s kind of looking out the window while they’re driving down the road with a smile on their face. They’ll have this kind of Instagram look to them.

The idea is that, if you come, here’s like — not that we’re promising happiness, but you know, people usually meet a lot of their goals when they come to Mental Wellness Counseling and so, a stream or a mountain and sorry, if you’ve made a bunch of websites with those, but those don’t always speak to what we do in the field. I mean, it’s a very abstract concept of just like kind of peacefulness, but I think that there are so many websites out there that do that. It sounds like what you’re saying is really stand out and make sure that you are front and center or the people that are at your practice are front and center.

PR: Exactly. It’s not to say though that, you can’t have images of nature on your website. You certainly can, you have images, but people connect with people. So if you want images of nature on your website, make sure there’s people in there too or make sure that there are quotes that speak to you and your practice, that align with your values that you want to get across. That way you’re attracting clients that you want to work with. If you’re going to go just with nature photos, what I would recommend is have quotes on top of them as well that slide in and really help differentiate you.

Joe Sanok: Well, I was just interviewing Chris Ducker for my other podcast last night, and he said “People do business with people and businesses do business with businesses” and for the longest time on my Twitter, I had my Practice of the Practice logo and everything, and recently I changed that to be me and it kind of mentions Practice of the Practice. I found out that so many more people are engaging, because it’s more about, “Well, Joe Sanok has something unique to say, not Practice of the Practice, this entity that I don’t even know what that is.” I think you’re right on with that.

There’s a lot of other things you do. I’m really interested in kind of — you know, there’s a certain other unnamed website out there that tends to focus on helping therapists make sites. To me, I guess there’s a lot of pros to having someone just make a template site for you to get started. Tell me why, not just are you different, but why did you create something that, you know, in a sense, there’s already people that were doing what you are doing, and how are you different from that?

PR: Sure. On the identity being therapy sites. Therapy sites, they do a lot of things really well. They allow you to get a website in a few clicks of a button and that can be really beneficial. You know, you get a reward right away, but what we noticed is you know, they have over 10,000 clients. So that’s 10,000 websites that could look like yours.

We noticed a gap in the market place of you know, where can we provide affordable web design and support while making websites that are different and that each website can be unique. What we did is we developed a number of internal themes specifically for therapists. Some we also utilized a few things off a theme forest too, that we purchase each time, but most of our themes are ones that we’ve developed in-house.

We’ve just customized it uniquely for everyone, because if you’re a marriage and family therapist and you choose theme A, it needs to look different than if you’re an addictions counselor and you choose theme A. You can’t have the same exact website. What we do is you know, therapy sites they take — there’s a really nice machine approach to everything. You click some buttons, you put some text in, all of a sudden you have a website.

With us, we take a much more human approach to everything. So, with Brighter Vision, if you sign up for Brighter Vision, you get assigned to one of our lead developers here in our Colorado office. We work with you closely to select the right theme for your business, and then we customize every single element of it for you. So, we customize the colors, we customize the textures, the fonts, the images. We give you the opportunity to have 10 unique photos from Big Stock Photo that we purchase for you at no extra cost.

How to save $3,000

So you have a really unique website and unique look and feel to your site that typically, if you went through a standard web developer you have to pay $3,000 or more to get, but with a Brighter Vision site you get that professional site at a fraction of the cost. We have a great value ads in it, too.

My background is in search engine optimization. All of our staff here are trained in SEO, to understand the right — how to do key word research, how to write effective search engine optimization titles and descriptions and things that will ensure that your website communicates to the search engines. We go through your site and we do a full site SEO audit. Rewriting all of your titles and descriptions to make sure that you’re communicating — your website’s communicating effectively to Google and Bing.

Joe Sanok: So, let me ask you about, especially that, because say someone like myself, who’ve I’ve already got a website that I like the look of. I’m probably not going to transition, not because I don’t like you guys, but probably at a different point than maybe someone that’s starting out and wanting to build a website. What are some things, that just like basic SEO, I can go through my blog posts and the titles that are going to help me rank higher?

PR: Sure, yes. There’s some just you know, great basic SEO tenants to have. For one, make sure you’re on WordPress, but WordPress in and of itself does not ensure SEO success. One thing you want to do is make sure you get the Yoast SEO plug-in install.

Joe Sanok: I love that plug-in.

PR: Oh, it’s fantastic!

Joe Sanok: Oh my gosh!

PR: We can’t live without it.

Joe Sanok: Yeah. That’s so great to hear a web developer say that you love those tool that I love because I don’t at all consider myself a web developer, but to know that you’re using the same tool, it’s like all right! I’m on the same track.

PR: Yeah! It’s great!

Joe Sanok: So, what’s the name of that plug-in again?

PR: Yoast. That’s Y-O-A-S-T S-E-O, Yoast SEO plug-in. There’s a bunch of different settings that you’ll want to utilize. I just had a great idea for an article here. What we’ll do is we’ll write an article here and you can go to brightervision.com/therapistseo and we’ll give you a full tutorial on how to set up Yoast SEO for your website, make sure all the settings are right because there are a lot of settings there. So, we’ll go ahead and write that article in the next week or so.

Then what you would want to do is write unique titles and descriptions for all of your pages. Let’s say you — A good strategy to utilize for that would be, first you can go to Google Ad Words or adwords.google.com and use their keyword planner to get a sense of what people are searching for.

Joe Sanok: Let me just say and I’ll put this in the show notes. I have a walk through on Practice of the Practice of exactly how to do that. So I will put that in the show notes.

PR: I was just about to say it’s gotten so much — it’s gotten more complex in the last five years. So if you have a tutorial for that, that’s perfect. Go check that out on Joe’s practiceofthepractice.com and then what you want to do is try some unique titles. For example, what you specialize in, and then you want to use a pipe bar which is on my keyboard it’s Shift + the symbol right above Return.

Joe Sanok: I never knew what that was called. A pipe, pipe bar?

PR: Pipe bar, P-I-P-E B-A-R, yeah.

Joe Sanok: I always just call it that straight up line thing.

PR: Yes, utilize that straight up line thing. Put your city, the State initial, so Traverse City, MI and then do another pipe bar and put your zip code in. That right there will give you a good advantage over everybody else because if you’re putting your specialty plus your city plus your zip, if someone searches for your specialty and zip code, you’re relevant. If someone searches for your specialty plus your city, you’re relevant. If someone searches your specialty, city plus city, plus zip, you’re relevant.

Joe Sanok: Now are you saying to do that in the title of your blog post?

PR: I would do that in the title of your blog post and then in your descriptions as well. Your meta description which is the text underneath. If you do a Google search the text underneath the blue clickable link. Put your city if you can, put your specialty and write a description what the page is about and you want to make them unique to every single page. For your About Page, put your name in and about Perry Rosenbloom, pipe bar Boulder, Colorado, therapist, pipe bar 80305, for example. That way, you’re just adding relevancy to your articles and that’s what on-site search engine optimization is about, is making sure your website and your pages, each individual page is relevant for specific search queries, especially.

Joe Sanok: Okay, so you go through, you do all that. Within the actual blog post or page, are there things that you can do to say start searching or ranking higher in search engines as well?

PR: Yes. Make your — there’s a number of different things and let’s just assume that everyone’s on WordPress because we couldn’t speak to every content management system out there. With WordPress, your page title generally is going to be what’s called your headline 1 tag, and that is another important signal to send to the search engines.

Then there’s also things called headline 2 tags. A headline tag will basically break your page up, so if you have a services page, you list out all your services on that page, all of your specialties, for example. Each individual specialty could be a headline 2 tag or a headline 3 tag and then you can link those tags and those specialties to deeper pages that elaborate more about that specialty. That’s a good strategy to utilize to add content to your site, to brainstorm content and to ensure that it’s relevant throughout your site whether if your SEO is relevant to your site rather.

Joe Sanok: Sure, sure. How important are links for ranking? I mean, internal links, external links. I know that there’s a big change in Google as to the importance of back linking and having all these shadow sites that are linking. I know that a lot people probably listening don’t have any clue what I’m talking about with the shadow site type thing, so disregard that. What about internal links linking to other articles that you’ve written within your website or having other therapy friends that link to your website? Talk about that a little bit.

PR: Sure. What I want every single one of your audience members to do right now is to go to Google, if they’re in front of a computer, and do a search for click here. You’re going to see that the top result is Adobe Reader. Now why is that?

Well, it’s because whenever someone has a PDF document, below it, below the link to the PDF document it will say “click here” with a link to Adobe to get Adobe Reader. So what that is essentially doing is every single one of those websites that links to Adobe Reader with the link text being click here, is essentially voting for Adobe Reader as being relevant for the words “click here”.

Links are very important. Now, the importance of it and how many you necessarily need will vary by your industry. If you’re competing against you know, if you’re in a small town, not too many people have a well SEOed website, you don’t really need too many links. Just go about building your business and building a great website, and the links will come in naturally. If you have some people you refer to regularly, you create a resources page and link to them and ask that they link back to you.

What is “link love”?

That’s sort of a mutual link exchange, it’s called. That generally is a good effective strategy to get something what’s called link love as we like to say back to your site.

Now, if they could link with text that is relevant to you, so if you’re seeking an addictions counselor in Jacksonville, Florida, and addictions counselor Jacksonville Florida is the link to your — the person you refer to, then that will naturally help them.

It’s important not to go overboard on that. If you can get 2 or 3 that’s all really I would recommend going for. Really, don’t spend too much time on it. If you can get the on-site which is that your SEO titles and SEO descriptions done well, you’re going to be in a much better place than 98% of your competition.

Joe Sanok: Yeah, yeah. I’m amazed when I consult with people, one thing I do is what’s called the SWOT Analysis, so strength, weakness, opportunities, threats. As a part of that, we evaluate not just their website, but websites of their top five to eight competitors. It is amazing how easy it is for people to out rank a lot of their top competition. Even if they have beautiful websites, their SEO is usually just terrible. So this field is a great field for if you know anything about SEO to be able to rank high in.

PR: Oh yeah. So many developers out there, they’ll build you a nice site, but do they know how to configure Yoast SEO properly? Do they know how to write an appropriate title? Do they know how to ensure that an appropriate title is being used? An SEO title is being used for your home page, as opposed to just “Welcome to WordPress” or just another WordPress site which is the default SEO title, and so by just having some good on-site SEO, your titles and descriptions and all.

Joe Sanok: So I had this pop-up that just said “You lost your internet”.

PR: Oh no!

Joe Sanok: Like, how? What? So, welcome back. I swear it happens every 3 or 4 interviews. This building must just decide to turn the internet off.

You’re just wrapping up about titles and about everything else in regards to the internet and in regards to ranking in Google. Let’s just move on to the kind of the next, kind of the wrap up. There are a few things that you’re going to give away that I want to talk about in a minute, but one question that I always ask people at the end of the interview is, what’s one thing that you wish every counselor in America knew?

PR: If their site was mobile-responsive or not. That would be a big one. I should have thought of this a little more in-depth. That’s definitely a big one right there. I guess another thing that would be really important is do you know how your visitors are finding you? Do you have Google Analytics installed? If you do, do you have goals set up? If you do, when someone contacts you, are they redirected to a thank you page and does that thank you page trigger a goal? If that happens, you’ll know where they came from, generally, and be able to analyze what sort of marketing tactics are working for you.

If someone comes to your website from Psychology Today, and they fill out a contact form, you’ll know that they came from Psychology Today. If they come from a Google search, you’ll know that they came from a Google search. Granted you’ll still probably want to follow up with them, and ask them “Hey, how did you hear about me? How did you find me?” and so that’s not the end-all, be-all, but it’s a good tactic to implement just so that you know because you don’t know what’s working unless you know.

Joe Sanok: Right. Well, in that flow of how to do the thank you page when somebody does this and that, that’s for me, is something that I haven’t been able to figure out yet. So if you have any resources or blog posts or anything, send those my way. I’d love to put them on the show notes just for my own personal development because when someone say, buys my E-book or whatever I’d love to have that whole — like being able to track that within Google Analytics. There’s so much in Google Analytics that you can look at and to figure out like what are the things to actually like spend my time on versus not. I’m sure 99% of the people out there are just overwhelmed with it, and they’re like and “Look! I had that many visitors! Okay, I’m happy!”

PR: Or you don’t know what those visitors mean.

Joe Sanok: Right.

Two plug-ins that redirect to thank you pages

PR: Here’s what we’ll do. I love just blog content creation ideas. It’s such a great inspiration. We’ll get an article written, go to brightervision.com/thank-you-page and we’ll write up a full tutorial on how to get analytics installed, create goals in analytics and utilize two different plug-ins that you can create for contact forms and how to make them redirect them to thank you pages.

Joe Sanok: Wow! You’re awesome! That’s really great! I’m glad this isn’t going live like tomorrow. Unless you’ll be up all night with your team and your virtual assistants and stuff.

PR: Oh gosh! We’ll be writing all night, but we’ll get that done.

Joe Sanok: I use AWeber for my email content. I don’t know who you guys use, but for me, all of those systems of AWeber can track who bought what into Google Analytics. Those kind of things, oh man, we should do a webinar or something on that because to me —

PR: I’d be happy to.

Joe Sanok: Okay, let’s brainstorm offline about something like that because there are so many things that I think that we as counselors could be doing better to track things. That your “one thing every counsellor should know”, I’m like “Wait, I usually know the things people say and I don’t know that.”

PR: You do know if your website’s mobile-responsive?

Joe Sanok: I do know that. I do know how many people are coming, where they’re coming from. For the most part, I know where the money’s coming from, but being able to track a lot of what you kind of talked about, that I think is my own personal next step, so thanks a lot for that, Perry.

PR: Awesome! Great. I’m glad we could help.

Joe Sanok: Yeah, yeah. Well, Perry and Brighter Vision, they’re actually going to be conference sponsors. They’re one of our larger sponsors at The Most Awesome Conference for therapists and you can hear more about that at mostawesomeconference.com/about, and it’s just going to be so awesome. We just started talking about our lunch schedule, and rather than do catering, we’re actually going to have a food truck just pull into the driveway, and people can kind of go get their food. At this point, which you know, we still have a couple weeks till this is going to go live. I think we have 20 tickets left. If there’s tickets left still, just go check out mostawesomeconference.com/about.

Perry, thanks for all the amazing content and for being a sponsor and just what you’re doing, I mean, the amount of really sweet things that you’re giving away. You actually said that you’re going to put together a “Ten things for ten” — you can do 10 minutes talk about that.

PR: Yeah, sure. We got two more great things for your audience. If you go to brightervision.com/joe, you can download an E-book on, Ten 10-minute steps to get more clients from your website. So, we’re going to write an E-book specifically for your audience here on things that they can implement on their site, provided it’s a WordPress website that will help them get more clients from their website. That’s a pretty awesome thing I think that will help a lot of people, and then we got a coupon code for your audience members as well. If you use the coupon code “practice”, you will get $10 off Brighter Vision per month for one year. It will lower your cost down to $49 a month for one year and again that includes everything. That includes your web design. That includes your search engine optimization and includes all the support you need. You just email us at support@brightervision.com, you get a real company support at you, not some web guy or web gal. We go ahead, we take care of support tickets almost always within the same business day. I’m in there about 4 hours a day right now because our developers are so busy building new sites. So yeah. Once again coupon code “practice”.

Joe Sanok: Wow! Awesome. Perry Rosenbloom from brightervision.com, thank you so much for taking time out of your day. Honestly, out of every podcast interview I’ve ever done, you just gave away more content for free than anyone else, so all of that’s going to be in the show notes, and I will let you know what those show notes are at the end of the show here.

Thanks a lot Perry. Have an awesome day.

PR: Thanks. Thank you. You, too, Joe. Have a most awesome day, for The Most Awesome Conference.

Joe Sanok: Well played and said. Well played. All right, have a good one.

PR: You, too.

Joe Sanok: You know, if Perry didn’t live in Colorado, he would be the kind of guy I would want to hang out with. We just — I had so much fun in that interview, not that I don’t with the other interviews, but he just — like I just felt like this energy and the fact that the podcast is now at the point that people say “Hey, I want to just give stuff away to your audience, because I know that it’s going to help them and through helping and serving, it’s also probably going to grow their business.”

How great is it that we live in an era where giving things away for free and adding value, helps you grow a business. I mean, I still just go back to when I sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door in college, and it was terrible. They taught all these like slimy tactics to me, and I just hated it. There was nothing that was adding value. I mean, we would go into low income areas and sell these like multi-thousand dollar vacuum cleaners. It just felt so slimy, and you know, I’m sure there are vacuum salespeople out there that are not slimy. Like I don’t think they all are, but that was my view of business, and now to be able to do things that I’m passionate about, you know, teaching people how to run a better counseling private practice.

Working with people like Perry from Brighter Vision and with Simple Practice and Howard and like all these consultants, I mean, if you’re not excited like you should turn this podcast off, because to me, this is so invigorating to be doing this sort of work and to be growing my income doing it. I hundred percent believe you can do that exact same thing, too. So many cool giveaways. Let me just give you the landing page that will have a link to all those different things. That’s just going to be practiceofthepractice.com/session70, and after this interview, I had a consulting client who needed a website, and he didn’t have a very big budget. I jumped on Brighter Vision and clicked on their chat feature and just said “Hey, it’s Joe from Practice of the Practice. I have a consulting client that’s probably going to be reaching out to you.”

And Perry, this was at like around 9:00 at night my time, so like 7:00 at night his time. He just popped on right there and said “Yeah, I’ll contact the person. I’ll have my” — I think it’s CFO, the Chief Fun Officer, I want to say, is their like customer experience person. I was just so impressed that like the president of this company is chatting and that he was on it right then. Definitely check them out. Also, if you need practice management software, they can help with billing, with insurance payments, with any of that sort of thing.

That is so complex sometimes, just check out Simple Practice. They have been such a big supporter of the work that I’ve done and giving me the opportunity with webinars. They’re just a really cool company. I mean, they run it really well. So check them out, too.

Thank you so much for letting me into your ears and into your brain. I know this week you’re just going to kill it so I hope that you go out there and figure out what your one major thing is that you’re going to focus on and just do it with such energy, enthusiasm and just go change the world this week. Thanks so much for letting me into your ears and brain. I’ll talk to you next week.

Special thanks to the bands Silence is Sexy and Builders. Thanks for letting us use your music, excuse me, and this — I just now going into this I’m going to screw it up, like you know when your mental energy just shifts, okay.

This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the guest nor the publisher is rendering legal, accounting, clinical or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one, like Perry from Brighter Vision or Simple Practice. All right, have a good one! Peace!

Great episode; I cringe when I think about all the “sad tree” pics I put on my first website!
I think so many counselors struggle to do their websites because there’s so much fear around getting clear on who they are and what their specialty is (I had to rewrite copy about 5 times just to whittle down the wordiness of my site– and probably need to do it a few more times!). Anyway, I’ve passed your info on to a friend who’s new in private practice and having “website-fear”. Thanks for all you do (and for the free resources!).